Years

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There has been somewhat of a brew-ha-ha over Facebook’s controversial changes to their terms of service where they claimed ownership and rights of content you upload even when you delete your account. Yay.

Now normally I’d be right in the thick of such a controversy like this, getting agitated and espousing my own views in detail here on why I thought they were in the wrong and what they would need to do to regain the public trust, but in this case I can’t help but pose one small, timeless question:

What did you expect?

Did people really think a closed, gated community such as Facebook where external search engines weren’t allowed access and where your uploaded media was only available to people who created accounts would breed ethical behaviour? Did people really think Facebook would behave ethically at all in the first place? I have a really, really hard time believing this; it sound too much like people who were upset at MySpace, and AOL, and presumably stone tablets if you go back far enough.

I have a Facebook account, I have a few photos on there too. I never assumed though that such media would be safe from licence nonsense; quite the opposite. It’s their business model… well, if they had one at all that is. On sites like Flickr I pay for their service and explicitly licence my media under Creative Commons, on Facebook there never was such a provision. As a result I don’t upload anything of value onto Facebook; heck I don’t even upload full resolution photos onto Flickr as is! But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here.